Stargate SG-1 Gets A Seventh Season

An anonymous reader writes "Farscape may or may not have been cancelled [does anyone know?], and Enterprise is so politically correct I can barely bring myself to watch it, but with MacGyver onboard, it looks like Stargate SG-1 will be back for a seventh season."

Comments

farscape still cancelled

[banky]

Farscape is still cancelled, but some people are trying to save it, and the jury is still out. It's a dead man (show) walkin' but it's not over till the switch is thrown.

Good!

[shadowj]

I've been a fan of the show since I stumbled upon it two years ago. OK, the premise is a little hokey... but the writing is SO good. The dialog sparkles, they avoid techobabble and use real science more often than I'd expect ("Y'see, Carter" [waving at ringed gas giant looming on the horizon], "this planet that we're on..." "Excuse me, sir, this is actually a moon, not a planet.")

Best of all, the show has a memory... every episode takes into account EVERYTHING that has happened in previous episodes, something that happens in real life but rarely happens on TV. Looks like the Enterprise people are starting to understand that... pity they haven't figured out how to write interesting stories, though.

I had my doubts about Michael Shanks leaving, but the show doesn't seem to have suffered. I'm very, very pleased that it's continuing... but I hope that the producers will have the good sense to pull the plug when they start to run out of steam.

Re:Question about SG TV series

[sql*kitten]

I have never watched this show but am curious how it compares to the Star Trek and Babylon 5 series in that does it have a story arc and continuity between each episode?

The show has great continuity and the technology is almost completely internally consistent. By that I mean, if a given piece of technology worked one way in one episode, then that's how it works. Unlike Star Trek where the technology is a crutch for weak script writers. You know the way in Star Trek the transporters or sensors will simply stop working for an arbitrary reason to prod the plot along? Doesn't happen on Stargate at all, and without that crutch, the writers are forced to be much more creative.

Another example: Enterprise is set years before Kirk, so deflector shields haven't been invented yet. But the writers are too lazy to do away with the "shields are failing" plot device, so they simply substitute in the technobabble "hull polarization" and write exactly as before. Star Fleet doesn't exist yet, but Earth's single, primitive starship can interfere with established, advanced spacegoing races with impunity, just like Kirk or Picard... how? Umm, because that's the only plot they know how to write.

Another thing that annoyed me about Star Trek and Babylon 5 was their Earth-centricness, Earth being the capital planet of the Federation and humans being the "chosen race" in Babylon 5. In Stargate, humans are in a complex universe in which often they are only bit players in the ongoing feuds of the Goa'uld amongst themselves, the Asgard have problems of their own in their home galaxy and often cannot be bothered with Earth's problems, etc. All the other races have been getting on with their histories without Earth even being relevant for large periods of time (i.e. Earth was ignored by the Goa'uld since the Egyptian period). This ongoing activity by NPCs means that the storylines continue between episodes.

Finally, the characters on Stargate are more believable. They are fairly ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, not like Star Trek (particularly TNG) in which each character is "special", the boy genius, the telepath, the noble warrior, etc. Star Trek characters in every series apart from the original are cliches.